Leave out the lies and the rest, as they say, is history

A YEAR ago, Mr Justice Gray presented his judgment in the libel case which David Irving, the highly successful self-taught historian of Hitler and Nazi Germany, had lodged against Penguin Books and the American academic Deborah Lipstadt.

He accepted the evidence that Sir John Keegan and I had given under subpoena as to Irving's real achievements as a military historian. But on the issues of the case - Irving's misuse, misrepresentation and distortion of the evidence bearing on the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry, in particular on the role of the Nazi camps at Auschwitz - he condemned the historian mercilessly.

Hooray, said the media, Irving is discredited completely. I must say it was news to me that anyone in Britain had ever credited Irving on these issues. But this case was one brought by Irving against Americans.

Guttenplan is an American, a former journalist working for a doctorate at University College, London. This is the first of several books on the trial. (Others are imminent from Professor Richard Evans of Cambridge, the most formidable witness for the defence, and from Professor Lipstadt herself.) Guttenplan's book reads well and gives a lively picture of everything that happened at the trial - not always accurately, for he has two bad problems. He dislikes and misunderstands Britain, the British legal and historical elites and especially British Jewry - though to be fair, I do not think he realises this last point. He knows nothing of the history of Holocaust denial in Britain; he does not really understand the British fascination with the second world war, under the cover of which the Holocaust was staged. He writes from within the American Jewish community and its acute anxiety that the denial of the Holocaust anywhere foreshadows its repetition. Nobody who is not Jewish has any right to criticise them on their anxieties.

Guttenplan's second problem is that although he is training to be a professional historian he does not understand what it is that a historian must profess. Professor Evans, son of a Welsh Methodist, does. Guttenplan thinks Irving was rightly condemned for distorting historical evidence and writing false history on the Holocaust. Professor Evans (and on this I am 100% in agreement) condemns Irving for wilfully distorting historical evidence - period. To him, and to me, this is the cardinal sin. Historians are the custodians and interpreters of the past. We have little enough evidence, even of the recent past. All of it passes through a succession of distorting mirrors in the processes by which it is recorded and remembered. A permanent threat comes from those who attempt to ensure victory for what they believe in by "fixing the past" in a particular image.

There are enough barriers and filters between us and the proper reconstruction of past events, and every day we are carried further and further away from them by time itself. Wilful, deliberate falsification and misrepresentation of the past threatens to destroy our links with, and our understanding of, who we are, where we come from and where it is that we are heading. And we professional historians are so thin on the ground that we have to be able to trust one another's conclusions and the methods by which they have been reached.

Irving's knowledge of the mountains of German evidence was such that he was trusted; only on the Holocaust, where he seemed to have his own agenda, did common sense, without which historians are prey to every pitfall on the road, lead British historians at least to ignore him and dismiss him as a conspiratorially-minded amateur. Thanks to the market impulses of publishers there are plenty of his ilk about.

In America, fears exist that enough of the public whom we all serve (since it is their links with the past we seek to preserve) were about to trust Irving on the Holocaust. Personally, I doubt this; but, not being Jewish myself, I do not feel this to be my business.

Anyone who has a mind above Celebrity Big Brother should read this book, despite its faults. It is not really about the Holocaust. The smoking chimneys, the incessant rumble of trains delivering their quotas of weaklings for the gas chambers and stronger ones to be worked to death, and the despair and fear and misery of the camps should live in your minds. That the victims were Jewish, not British, we owe to the Channel and the RAF. And the details of the trial are incidental; the issue is really about how we remember the past against the efforts of those who try to enlist it on their side.

The Holocaust On Trial: History, Justice And The David Irving Libel Case By DD Guttenplan (Granta, #17.99)

Copyright 2001
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